EGU Blogs

Science Policy

Are there issues when industry and academia team up for research?

April 29, 2014

As an academic palaeontologist within a university, I have almost no industry links or prospects in my present or future. However, Dr. Alice Bell, science-policy aficionado, has invited me to join several distinguished guests in sparking a discussion about the links between industry and academia. This was following a twitter discussion (a twebate?) we both had following her post on the genesis of a partnership of sorts between one of the government-funded Research Councils, NERC, and fossil fuel giant Shell. It’s on May 20th at 7pm, the Fairly Square in London, and it would be great to see some of y’all there. I have a request beforehand though, for you to share your personal experiences or any thoughts and comments with the blog about links between industry and academia. Alice has set a number of target questions on her site.

The questions which I hope to address in my few minutes are:

  • Does increasing industry involvement alleviate the responsibility of the government to fund research?
  • What the implications of ‘strategy alignment’ between Research Councils and industry mean for research
  • The types of research that industry (Shell, maybe others) actually fund
  • The lack of obligation for industry to be open/transparent about the outputs of research (e.g., no OA obligation)
  • Overall implications for the impartiality/independence of research
If anyone has thoughts on these points, or those Alice has asked on her page, please do share them here. It would be useful to gather as broad experience as possible before delving into something that, admittedly, I am only familiar with on a general level and within my own department at university.

Every time you publish behind a paywall, a kitten dies.

April 23, 2014

“Every day, people are denied access to something they have a right to.”

That’s the opening line from a new appeal from students Joe McArthur and David Carroll. Open Access describes a form of publication of research where articles are made instantly available for free, and with unlimited reusability rights, as long as the source is attributed. There are many pseudo-open access ‘definitions’ out there from publishers to obfuscate its use, but this is the only real, least restrictive one.

There has been a global open access movement over the last 10-15 years, which has accelerated so rapidly in the last year or two that many research funders and institutions, as well as government bodies, have developed open access policies. However, despite this progress, large commercial publishers like Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Elsevier are still the most profitable industry in the world (with margins even higher than Apple), the majority of their profits coming from obscene charges for pdfs and library subscriptions for research articles and journals.

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Macroecology – scaling the time barrier

April 7, 2014

If there was ever an overdue discussion in palaeontology, it was how we reconcile the differences in time scales when looking at different periods in our history. This is becoming increasingly more important as scientific research is being asked to have demonstrably greater ‘impact’ in terms of some social, economic, or environmental relevance, and for palaeobiologists and palaeoecologists, this means having some sort of notable effect on our changing world.

The day kicked off with Andy Purvis summarising what we actually mean by macroecology – I mean, it’s an impressive sounding term, but what is it scientifically? It’s actually varied quite a bit in time, with new tools and datasets meaning that our analyses have diversified and become more intricate, with the ability to answer and ask new questions about how species and populations diversify and change through time, especially with respect to the environment.

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The Cambridge Science Festival

March 22, 2014

Last night, I was honoured to have spoken at the final evening lecture at the Cambridge Science Festival, along with Nick Crumpton, Anjali Goswami, Rob Asher, and Stephanie Pierce, about why palaeontology is important. Below is a rough transcript of some of what my talk was about. Unlike the others, I didn’t discuss my own research. Instead, by general gist was that although palaeontology is useful in addressing some of the greatest scientific questions of our time, like the evolution and history of life on Earth, the current narrow framing of science in terms of impact is being quite detrimental to creativity and exploratory science. As such, should palaeontology be more focused on its emotive qualities, and be used as a ‘hook’, or ‘gateway’ into the other fields of science?

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